Once in possession of the Erie road, Fisk and his colleagues managed it in their own interests. It was commonly believed in the city that Fisk was but the executor of the designs which were conceived by an abler brain than his own.
He figured largely in the infamous Black Friday transactions of Wall street, and is credited by the public with being one of the originators of that vast conspiracy to destroy the business of the street. How near he came to success has already been shown.
Soon after coming into possession of the Erie road, he
purchased Pike’s Opera House for $1,000,000 in the name of the Erie Railway Company. The Directors, however, refused to approve the transaction, and he refunded to them the amount of the purchase, taking the building on his private account, and repaying the road in some of its stock owned by him. Subsequently he leased the front building to the road at an enormous rent, and opened for it a suite of the most gorgeous railway offices in the world. He subsequently bought the Fifth Avenue Theatre, and the Central Park Garden, and the Bristol line of steamers, and the steamers plying in connection with the Long Branch Railway. He made himself “Admiral” of this magnificent fleet, and dressed himself in a gorgeous naval uniform. When President Grant visited the Coliseum Concert at Boston, Fisk accompanied him in this dress, having previously played the part of host to the President during the voyage down the Sound on one of his boats. A year or two previous to his death, he was elected Colonel of the Ninth Regiment of the National Guard.
Previous to his purchase of the Grand Opera House, Mr. Fisk was an unknown man, but the ownership of this palatial establishment gave him an opportunity of enjoying the notoriety he coveted. His career in connection with this establishment, and his unscrupulous management of the Erie Railway, soon made him notorious in all parts of America and Europe. His monogram was placed on everything he owned or was connected with, and he literally lived in the gaze of the public. He can scarcely be said to have had any private life, for the whole town was talking of his theatres, his dashing four in hand, his railway and steamboats, his regiment, his toilettes, his magnificence, his reckless generosity, and his love affairs. He had little regard for morality or public sentiment, and hesitated at nothing necessary to the success of his schemes. His great passion was for notoriety, and he cared not what he did so it made people talk about him. He surrounded himself with a kind of barbaric splendor, which won him the name of the “Prince of Erie.” Some of his acts were utterly ludicrous, and he had the wit to perceive it, but he cared not so it made James Fisk, jr.,
the talk of the day. His influence upon the community was bad. He had not only his admirers, but his imitators, and these sought to reproduce his bad qualities rather than his virtues.
In some respects he was a strange compound of good and evil. He was utterly unprincipled, yet he was generous to a fault. No one ever came to him in distress without meeting with assistance, and it adds to the virtue of these good deeds that he never proclaimed them to the world. Says one of his intimate friends: “His personal expenses were, at a liberal estimate, not one-fifth as large as the amount which he spent in providing for persons in whose affairs he took a kindly interest, who had seen misfortune in life, and whom he felt to be dependent upon him for assistance. He gave away constantly enormous amounts in still more direct charities, concerning which he rarely spoke to any one, and it was only by accident that even his most intimate friends found out what he was doing. He supported for some years an entire family of blind persons without ever saying a word about it to his nearest friends. He was particularly generous towards actors and actresses, who, whenever they suffered from misfortune, would always appeal to him; and one lady, herself an actress of considerable repute and of very generous nature, was in the habit of coming constantly to Mr. Fisk to appeal to him for assistance to aged or unfortunate members of their profession, assistance which he never refused. Very recently a lady, who was formerly a New York favorite, but who made an unhappy marriage, and to escape from a drunken husband had carried her child to England, where, after struggling in provincial theatres for more than a year, she came to almost her last penny and had hardly the means to return to this country, without a change of clothing and without being able to bring away her child, made her case known to the lady before-mentioned, who immediately, after helping to the extent of her own scanty means, sent her with a note to Mr. Fisk. Mr. Fisk listened to her story, advanced her $250 on the spot, procured her an engagement in a theatre at $75 a week, and interested the captain of one of our finest sea-going vessels in the case so far as to provide
a free passage for the child to this country, the captain, in order to please Mr. Fisk, taking great pains to discover the whereabouts of the child and restore her to its mother. These are but incidental illustrations of what Mr. Fisk was daily doing, and always doing with the utmost privacy and with the greatest reluctance to allow it to become known. He would rarely subscribe to any public charity, because he disliked to make any pretence of liberality before the public.”
In the fall of 1867, Fisk made the acquaintance of Mrs. Helen Josephine Mansfield, an actress, who had just been divorced from her husband, Frank Lawler. He became deeply enamored of her, and she became his mistress and lived with him several years, her main object being, it would seem, to obtain from him all the money he was willing to expend upon her. Fisk subsequently introduced one of his friends, Edward S. Stokes, to Mrs. Mansfield, and the woman was not long in transferring her affections from her protector to Stokes. This aroused Fisk’s jealousy, and led to constant trouble between his mistress and himself. His quarrel with Stokes was complicated by business disputes, which were carried into the courts, where Fisk was all powerful. The matter went from bad to worse, until at length Stokes and Mrs. Mansfield instituted a libel suit against Fisk, which was commonly regarded in the city as simply an attempt on their part to extort money from him. The suit dragged its slow way through the court in which it was instituted, and every day diminished the chances of the success of the plaintiffs.
For reasons which he has not yet made public, Stokes now resolved to take matters into his own hands, and on the afternoon of the 6th of January, 1872, waylaid Fisk, as the latter was ascending the private stairway of the Grand Central Hotel, and, firing upon him twice from his hiding place, inflicted on him severe wounds from which he died the next day. The assassination was most cowardly and brutal, and awakened a feeling of horror and indignation on the part of all classes.